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Project Server 2010 on Windows 7 – An update

A while back I posted about getting the Project Server 2010 beta to run on Windows 7. Whilst this wasn’t an officially supported scenario, it was possible. Fast forward to the Release Candidate and it seems that MS have introduced a check that will stop the install happening on any Windows client :(

Thanks to a comment by Aric, I tried installing both the SharePoint and Project Server release candidates on a Windows 7 x64 virtual machine. Whilst SharePoint 2010 installed fine, Project Server threw a ‘Windows Server Features or Role Services required by this product are not enabled’ error:

After checking through the event log, and making sure I had all the pre-requisites installed, I then dug in to the temporary log files the set up program creates, and found this telltale entry in the file:

It seems that the Project Server 2010 installer now has a hard coded call to ServerManagerCmd.exe an executable only present in the Windows Server SKU, which has basically stopped the ability to run Project Server 2010 on top of Windows 7. I guess we are all going to have to get used to running Windows Server 2008 R2 for local development.

13 thoughts on “Project Server 2010 on Windows 7 – An update”

I myself am someone who checks things up to the last bite as for
going in the logs and trying to hack things but due to the complexity
of all those new systems i found out that most of the time it’s just
a waste of time and the eastiest way is just ask the MS developers what
could be done or not. Of course i asked and received the answer we all know
that it just wont work!

Yes I found that solution worked a while back but decided not to post it since Windows 7 based Project Server installations are not officially supported and may exhibit different behaviours than a server installation. This workaround will give you something to demonstrate with or play with, but if you are going to do full on development, please ensure you have a proper server environment.

Hi Brothers,
I need to have MS-Project Server 2010 or 2013 on my laptop, because I’m a project management trainer and need to make some demos. My laptop is HP Pvilion g6 with 4GB RAM and 300GB hard drive, running windows 7. What is the best solution?